I was getting a belated start
on my weekly blog post and stopped to look up the mission statement for the Midwest Writing Center ,
my favorite not-for-profit organization.
I expected to find the
following the simple sentence:
Fostering the appreciation of the written word and
supporting its creators.
Instead, I found a nice photo
of a bunch of kids, probably some middle-schoolers from a recent summer-camp-style
workshop, with this displayed underneath:
Fostering the appreciation of the writeen word and
supporting its creators.
My first thought, “Ugh, typo
alert. They should fix that.”
Then I took a minute, looked
at it again, and began to appreciate the cleverness of that particular
misspelling. Especially in the context of a group of young people.
By entering one T
and two Es instead of two Ts and one E, the word transformed
to something new and exciting. A few misplaced keystrokes produced a superior
caption for that photo.
It put “teen” into the
writing picture.
After all, getting young
folks into writing was the whole
focus of the Midwest Writing Center ’s
YEW Middle School Camp and Young Emerging
Writers Summer Internship Program.
Sometimes typos and other
artistic mistakes have to be appreciated and savored for the subconscious gifts
they are.
“Totally cool,” in oldie
speak.
In other words, “Awesome.”